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In general, I very much agree with all of this. For us, there's a competing factor, though, which is that observant Jews tend to want to give our kids Jewish names, so the trick is to try and find something Biblical or Rabbinic that is pronounceable in English, sounds gender appropriate, but is original enough that 1/3 of the entire Jewish people doesn't end up being named David.
I would assume folks from other cultures have similar issues that they deal with.
Having myself been named by Orthodox parents who presumed that it would be okay to give me an untranslatable Hebrew name, because it didn't contain any sounds not made in English, and besides, I'd always be in an Orthodox community anyway (big fail. Haven't been Orthodox since I was 13. My mom's not Orthodox anymore either)...I can tell you it is no picnic. Now, since I got older, and began to care less that strangers inevitably mangle my name, or assign it to the wrong gender, I have been happy because it means something nice in Hebrew. But it was murder in childhood. Not happy. Not at all.
Personally, I like a lot of our traditional names. Mrs. Levite and I are now starting to try to have kids, and we've been tossing around names like Jeremy, Zachary, Elijah, Shoshanah, Tamara, and Keturah....
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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